Domination or Disgrace
On the Men We are Making
The continuing disclosures around Epstein are not simply the resurfacing of an old crime. They feel closer to an excavation — an incremental revealing of proximity, protection and collusive accommodation that extends far beyond one man.
As names are reintroduced into circulation and associations are examined in slow motion, what comes into view is less an aberration than a structure that endured because it was buffered.
We are not dealing with isolated scandal so much as a pattern whose insulation has begun to fail.
When men long cushioned by wealth, status or institutional proximity become publicly exposed as abusers — or as participants in a culture that enabled abuse — the reaction moves swiftly between moral outrage and something more ambiguous: fascination, speculation, a kind of collective gawking at the mechanics of power finally exposed.
The harm is undeniable. So is the appetite.
What interests me is not only the catalogue of individual wrongdoing, but the larger question of formation — what kind of masculinity is produced, rewarded and protected, and what happens when the system is no longer able or willing to shield it.
The details are nauseating; the structures, less surprising.
Outrage ignites quickly, as it should. Commentary multiplies even faster. The speed with which harm is metabolised into stance is striking, even as the underlying structures remain largely untouched.
Threaded through it all is a familiar unease about men - not newly born, but differently consolidated, no longer so easily dismissed as episodic outrage.
The question is shifting from individual perpetrators to the conditions that produce and protect them: how masculinity is shaped, what forms of entitlement are normalised, how power is inherited, rehearsed and defended.
What we are confronting may not be deviation at all, but design.
In a moment when opinion arrives almost simultaneously with revelation when denunciation, contextualisation and alignment blur into a single reflex.
I resist the demand for immediacy when the real work is diagnostic, not reactive.
There is pressure, particularly on women who think publicly, to register ourselves immediately — to demonstrate moral clarity, to articulate outrage, to reassure, to contextualise, and to be visibly present. Silence, even brief, is treated as evasion.
I am not persuaded by that tempo.
I have ten children, six of them sons.
This moment does not unfold for me at the level of abstraction; it lands in the ordinary architecture of our house. It is not a tidy morality play in which “men” and “women” function as opposing categories.
It is lived daily, in the formation of boys who will become men within a culture that oscillates between indulgence and exposure — that shields male fragility in youth and then expresses astonishment when it hardens into harm.
What does it mean to raise sons while the public image of masculinity is tethered, again and again, to abuse of power?
What does accountability look like if it is not annihilation — if it aims at transformation rather than spectacle?
How do we teach boys that power is a responsibility rather than a resource, when so much of what they see suggests the opposite?
Where is the line between empathy and excuse, and who draws it?
What kind of men are we attempting to cultivate when our cultural script offers them two options — domination or disgrace?
The cycle we are watching is not only about exposure; it is about appetite for revelation, for punishment, and for the clean satisfaction of narrative closure.
It would be easy to let this become another chapter in an ongoing theatre of male fallibility and female endurance.
I am less interested in theatre than in formation.
If the stories breaking are a reckoning, and in many cases they are, then the question is not merely who falls. It is who is being built in the aftermath.
Boys are absorbing this. They are reading the headlines. They are watching the tonal shifts. They are learning, consciously or not, what power affords and what it costs.
Harm is harm. Accountability is non-negotiable.
But neither is it useful to pretend that humiliation alone produces better men. Nor that fury, however justified, substitutes for structural change.
Before I add a fully formed essay, I am reading and refining the questions rather than amplifying the noise.
What follows are pieces that approach this with depth.
If you’re thinking beyond the headlines, about what this means for boys, for men, and for the culture that shapes them, let’s continue the conversation.
I’ve been listening to Pelicot’s book too and that really has been an eye opener. Also watched her interview with Derbyshire.
A few months ago I came across an article about the brother of a female murder victim who now tours the UK giving talks to young boys. Wish I could remember his name. He needs to be multiplied - and sent around many more.
Where does the seed come from - the seed of misogyny referred to so powerfully in that article on here last week (with the picture of plants around the men’s faces)? That’s the question which also needs to be explored in order to look at the others. Many would say it’s in porn.
I do think there’s a connection, but likely to be more than one thing. Social media has of course made it easier for more extreme views to bloom and congregate too. The Andrew Tates of this world. I’d like to see a documentary where young men are asked about this. In cinemas. Supported by big celebs who boys look up to too.
Danusia, Thanks for a thought provoking look at what engaged me when I was bringing up my own son (now aged 38) and now concerns me as I look at my grandsons ( now aged 10 & 14).